Human Behavior

Pearl Harbor – 67

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Let’s not forget.

If you want information, the Naval Historical Center archive that we linked in last year’s post is as good a place to start as any.

Maybe it’s normal for cultures to lose their memories, or at least to roll them forward to more-recent events. By that logic, perhaps September 11, 2001 should serve as the current generation’s version of December 7, 1941. Does it? I don’t think so. I think we’re losing the memories, old and new, as we lose cultural self-awareness. We’re losing cultural self-awareness because we are losing cultural self-confidence. We are losing cultural self-confidence in large part because we allowed our educational system to be taken over by people who see cultural self-confidence as a crime.

From the Naval Historical Center:

By late November 1941, with peace negotiations clearly approaching an end, informed U.S. officials (and they were well-informed, they believed, through an ability to read Japan’s diplomatic codes) fully expected a Japanese attack into the Indies, Malaya and probably the Philippines. Completely unanticipated was the prospect that Japan would attack east, as well.

Change the details and this story becomes generic. The most important events tend to be unanticipated, and not for anyone’s lack of trying to anticipate them. We should remember this truth even if we fail to remember specific events, though I suspect that the forgetting of events begets the forgetting of principles.

Interesting times ahead.

UPDATE: Via David Foster, this excellent post from Neptunus Lex.

Quote of the Day

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Sometimes the kindest, best, most useful six words one man can say to another, whether brother, father, friend or wharever are, she’s crazy, get rid of her.

–Tom Smith

Adversity and the Presidency

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Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Uses of   Adversity”    reinforces Michael Barone’s argument in  Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future.  Gladwell looks at difficulties:   poverty,  role as outsider,  such handicaps as dyslexia.    And he, too,  concludes that hard makes strong.   Gladwell’s rift is inspired by  The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs, by Charles Ellis.   Gladwell’s focus is on   the first seventy pages, which follow  the ascent of Sidney Weinberg.   Bluffing his way into a janitorial job, Weinberg moves upward to run and enlarge the investment firm.   Language can be telling.   When the United States moved from governing the plural verb “are” to the singular “is”, Lincoln had won, more surely than with Lee’s signature at Appomattox or the golden spike connecting east with west.   Gladwell points to a changed idiom:   “Nowadays, we don’t learn from poverty, we escape from poverty.”   We valued hard; now, easy is default.   Still, our leaders emphasize their trials McCain’s in the Hanoi Hilton; Obama’s alienation  as  African-American.   They expect  respect  for overcoming difficulties; we give it, in part, I suspect, because we still believe that hard does, indeed, make strong.  

 

[Update:   November 11 – if anyone is still reading this far into our column.]   The ever helpful A&L Daily links to  Jason Zengerle’s lengthy piece on Gladwell, Geek Pop Star.   The lengthy portrait discusses his new book, The Outliers.    Zengerle credits Gladwell with the  uncontroversial observation that  success is not merely personal will but happenstate;  this writer seems less impressed by the hardening than reducing the losers damaged in the hardening process.  Hard can be good – it can also, of course, debilitate.   It is not an accident or even a surprise to any observer of human nature that a disproportionate number of quite successful businessmen are dyslexic – nor that a disproportionate number of felons are.  )

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It Is Called “Dope”

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I didn’t have much of an opinion about illegal drugs back when I started to work for the police.

Oh, I had heard the arguments in favor of legalizing all drugs. This was back in the early 1990s, and our prisons were beginning to fill due to the so-called “War on Drugs”. Legalization advocates would point out that the economic cost of illegal drugs would be extremely low if they were suddenly acceptable. All the crime, violence, and social costs that came from addiction would disappear if the price wasn’t artificially inflated. Remove the drug laws and remove the profit incentive for gang bangers and pushers to do war in the streets. Make drugs cheap and there wouldn’t be any reason for junkies to commit crimes to feed their habit.

Like I said, I had heard the arguments in favor of legalization but had yet to form an opinion. Then I started to meet junkies up close and personal.

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Western Medicine and Number Gut Follow Up

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The past few years my mother had been feeling fatigued.   The condition kept getting worse and she finally went to a doctor.   To make a long story short, the mitral valve  on her heart was compromised, and the heart was not able to fully function.

Yesterday she had open heart surgery.   Everything went great.   The didn’t know until they opened her up if they were going to be able to repair the valve or replace it.     They prefer to repair it, but in this case it was damaged too much.   It was replaced with a valve made of tissue from a pig.   Really!   She will be walking through the hospital hallways TODAY (albeit very slowly), a mere 24 hours after the surgery.   I  am simply amazed at this.  

As a joke my dad is going to purchase a small pig trough and place it in their bedroom for my mom to see when she gets home from the hospital.   That is how  my family  rolls – we always make  jokes in tough or  stressful situations.   I think the hard Midwest winters darken our sense of humor.

As an interesting aside, the valve was damaged not because of a genetic defect, but from disease (this was good news for me).   The doctor proposed that my mother had rheumatic fever as a child and that this was the cause of the valve being compromised.  

It has been a stressful week for me, as there was a 1%-2% (between one and two percent)  chance that my mother could have died on the operating  table.   We are very thankful that everything went well.

Over the last week I have been thinking of Shannon’s posts about parents that don’t give their children vaccines because of quack science,  and people  not having any sort of decent number gut.

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